Elena Zaretska (on the right) in front of one of her grandmother's murals. Photo used with permission.

By Olena Solodovnikova

This story is part of a series of essays written by Ukrainian artists entitled “Regained Culture: Ukrainian voices curate Ukrainian culture.” This series is produced in collaboration with the Folkowisko Association/Rozstaje.art, thanks to co-financing by the governments of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia through a grant by the International Visegrad Fund. The mission of the fund is to advance ideas for sustainable regional cooperation in Central Europe. It has been translated from Ukrainian by Iryna Tiper and Filip Noubel.

We meet Alla Horska’s granddaughter, Olena Zaretska, near the “Wind” mosaic panel her grandmother created 60 years ago. At that time, a several-meter mosaic of glass and smalt pieces decorated the facade of the fashionable restaurant “Vitryak” (wind). The establishment is no longer in operation, and the building itself is drowned among skyscrapers. The panel, which combined motifs of Ukrainian folk art and avant-garde, has peeled off and frankly, looks quite neglected.

Zaretska stated that a petition for the reconstruction was launched because “Wind” is the only monumental work by her grandmother still remaining in Kyiv. Most of the works of Horska and her group, which included Viktor Zaretsky, Boris Plaksiy, Hryhoriy Synytsia, Anatoliy Limarev, and Boris Smyrnov, were created in eastern Ukraine. In the capital, officials in charge of ideology had conservative views, but in Donbas, monumental art was welcome, so artists took advantage of this opportunity.

“Contemporaries called Horska ‘the wind of change.’ She understood perfectly well that monumental art was a tool of propaganda, but that forbidden ideas could be promoted through it. Therefore, she concentrated on monumentalism in her work, as if she felt that she needed to leave as much of a legacy as possible,” said Zaretska.

Creating mosaics on the miners’ theme “Coal Flower” or “Prometheus,” Horska’s group managed to secretly promote Ukrainian colors, by decorating the drawings with sunflowers or using yellow and blue, the colors of the Ukrainian flag. This was not easy at the stage of submitting and approving sketches — entire art councils had to approve works and decide on funds for execution. In one case, there was a complaint about the mosaic “Tree of Life” — the plant was depicted with roots, which hinted at Ukrainian origin, something that contradicted the socialist vision, and general Soviet images that rejected any mention of ethnic identities. They had to scramble for an excuse and said a tree with roots best resembles a mining blast furnace — something very common in the Donbas region.

“It was always difficult to pass the art review process. On one well-known occasion, the jury did not approve a stained glass window with the image of the 19th-century Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko, because it did not ‘correspond to the image of a Soviet person.’ But he was never a Soviet person!”

Horska lacked diplomacy during those discussions: She would explode, shout, disagree, instead of opting for a different behavior, less eccentric, less sincere and not as direct. Usually, other team members were sent to the negotiations and managed to agree on compromises. “If you look carefully, the mosaic ‘Victory Banner’ is not decorated with any Soviet symbols — no hammers and sickles,” Olena Zaretska reflects. Thanks to compromises, bright panels with elements of Hutsul embroidery or decorated Easter eggs appeared on the walls of Donbas schools, reminding the Indigenous Ukrainian population and visitors from other Soviet republics of the region's Ukrainian identity. These were bright spots in the gray everyday life of miners. 

At the same time, other artists from the sixties were constantly intimidated, threatened, or imprisoned in camps. The Soviet authorities meticulously uprooted the sprouts of dissent. Demands for broader public, religious, and national rights, even from a small circle of people, were considered anti-state activities. Dissidents were isolated from society, thrown into prisons and psychiatric hospitals. Yet this did not stop the artistic resistance movement; rather, it strengthened it.

Horska emphasized that monumental art is made up of many “Is”: while it may strip individual artists of their identity, their collective presence still leaves a mark. Perhaps this was a consequence of the collective thinking imposed by the Soviet authorities. However, when in 1968 she signed the “Letter of 139,” an open letter denouncing the repression of Ukrainian artists, her name was struck from the list of designers of the “Young Guard” museum as a form of political punishment. She became upset: “They stripped me of authorship, they took away my name,” she lamented in a letter to her friend Stepan Zalyvakha, who was in exile. Soon, Horska would also be deprived of her life — she was murdered under the guise of a family conflict. 

There was also an attempt to destroy her legacy, as a dissident artist who only lived 40 years. Donbas mosaics began to be covered up under the pretext of renovations. This is what happened with the phantasmagoric works “Boryviter” and “Tree of Life” in Mariupol. The panels were miraculously rediscovered when the building underwent reconstruction, and her work reemerged. However, at the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a shell hit the mosaics, and now there is a huge hole in the wall between them.

“I’m afraid that the invaders will renovate everything and try to steal Horska, turning her into a typical Soviet artist. It’s scary to imagine how they can twist everything, because she was, on the contrary, against imperial views,” worries Olena Zaretska. “I was always afraid of the totalitarian system”. 

Fighting for greater freedom or artistic expression in Kyiv

Kyiv resident Yevgenia Fullen leads a group of mural artists and has repeatedly been involved in high-profile scandals. She is accused of damaging historical buildings and has even been ordered to remove one of her murals dedicated to France as a token of gratitude for their military support for Ukraine. The house was designed to depict the characters from Victor Hugo’s “Notre Dame de Paris” (also known as “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”): Quasimodo holding Esmeralda over a cliff, with a chimera beside them.

Yevgenia Fullen in front of a mural in Kyiv. Photo by Elena Solodovnikova, used with permission.

“We had permits, approval from neighbors, but some residents didn’t like the image of the chimera. Because of old-time superstition, they believe it’s a bad sign; that a Russian missile will fly into the house. People don’t understand that chimeras decorate Catholic cathedrals across  Europe, there’s nothing wrong with that,” explains Yevgenia.

As a result, the city authorities forced the artists to move the mural to another place. The sketch was covered up with paint. This incident prompted a commission in Kyiv to investigate the city’s murals, because, according to its initiators, the capital is visually littered with low-quality works by monumental artists. It is now impossible to paint outdoors in the capital without official permission. Fullen suggests that the commission will only approve works that fall within the framework of the unspoken “state trend” to draw something patriotic, but not hyperrealistic, or something abstract.

“Instead of giving artists the opportunity to move forward, to support us, we are regressing. I have always been afraid of totalitarian systems of repression, but I feel that we are heading towards this, as the authorities are beginning to control creators, and this scares me. There is a whole list of documents that you have to collect, then you have to show up for a discussion, present a visualization of how the work looks, from left and right, from the side, and from the bottom. Only then may they perhaps approve it, and bribes might be necessary. But we simply want the city to have at least one less scribbled wall without unnecessary bureaucracy,” explains Yevgenia Fullen. The artist and her group focus on works with social subtext — against domestic violence, calls for the release of prisoners. Recently, they painted the fence on the site of an orphanage, and have already started decorating an animal shelter.

The price for dissent 

Borisi Plaksy (on the left) in his apartment. Photo used with permission.

“My father was a principled man; he never compromised with the authorities, even when it had catastrophic consequences,” says the son of famous 1960s artist Borys Plaksy. He meets me in an apartment in an ordinary high-rise building. The place is more like a museum; in addition to numerous paintings on the walls, the rooms and the corridors are decorated with carved wooden furniture with unusual patterns. We sit down in the kitchen, and the son, also called Borys Plaksy, begins to reminisce: “This is not just an apartment, but the workshop where he worked until his last days. With Horska, they made mosaics from glass and ceramics, and then he independently began to work with wooden forms. My father could find a branch on the street and turn it into a piece of art. He also involved me in the work when I was little, allowing me to carve objects. Once, he even took me with him on an expedition to Cherkasy region, where he created a park of giant wooden sculptures inspired by the poet Taras Shevchenko.”

But all this happened in the late 1980s  the eve of the collapse of the USSR. Before that, Boris Plaksy experienced the KGB purges of dissidents. The persecution began after he, along with other dissidents, signed the “Letter of 139.” The consequences were immediate: he was forced to redesign the murals in the Khreshchaty Yar restaurant in the center of Kyiv, where several dozen progressive modern poets were depicted. The artist categorically refused, so the murals were scraped off the walls by builders, and he was fired from the monumental workshop of the Kyiv Art Combine.

‘I am a vandal, but many people like my ideas’

The artist Hamlet Zinkivsky creates black-and-white street art posters. For many years, Kharkiv’s authorities equated his murals with vandalism, and municipal workers destroyed his works of art. However, with the beginning of the full-scale invasion, Hamlet’s murals have been decorating central entrances of dilapidated city council buildings with symbolic explosive cocktails. They have not been touched by anyone, just like his other works.

“Kharkiv is my street gallery. All residents know who the author of the works is, and if something happens, they stand up for them. I am so glad about this! This is how we protect public space. While everyone was confused, I made several works on the streets using a barbaric method. If you collected a fine for each of my works, it would amount to a pretty sum of money.  I am a vandal, but many people like my ideas. I am also preparing Kharkiv for the return of its people after the war.” It is impossible not to notice Hamlet's murals; you come across them all over the city.

If the Ukrainian monumentalists of the sixties hoped that their works would last for centuries, their present-day counterparts do not expect their murals to last for even a decade. They say that time has sped up; however, nonconformism has not disappeared. The unwillingness to conform to the authorities’ rules continues to unite different generations of Ukrainian artists who have chosen the streets as their medium of expression. However, one should certainly distinguish between the struggle for freedom of expression in a closed totalitarian system and new challenges in a young democratic country at war, where artists still have the opportunity to openly engage in dialogue with society and the bureaucracy. The “right to draw” takes a lot of nerve from modern muralists, but for their predecessors, it often cost them their lives.